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Home > horizontal with lila > 109. love who you love: horizontal with indonesia’s openly LGBTQ+ singer-songwriter [1 of 2]
Podcast: horizontal with lila
Episode:

109. love who you love: horizontal with indonesia’s openly LGBTQ+ singer-songwriter [1 of 2]
Category: Health
Duration: 01:32:34
Publish Date: 2020-07-01 01:10:11
Description:

Hello horizontal lovers.

horizontal is consensual eavesdropping on conversations about intimacy of all kinds, recorded while lying down, wearing robes.

In this and the following episode, I lie down with Kai Mata, Indonesia’s rainbow-toting, openly LGBTQ+ singer-songwriter. She is a thoughtful rock star, an articulate activist, a love advocate, an outspoken woman with a bamboo guitar living a love life of liberation in a country that expects its women to be neither outspoken nor liberated. I love her. And her meter-long hair.

Kai wears maroon and black almost exclusively, right down to her motorbike helmet. She displays or wears a rainbow flag at every single show, at every single gig, and she will continue to do so until all of her people are free to love who they love.

She battles internet trolls, social media harassment, hate messages, homophobia, discrimination, and erasure by her culture of origin on a daily basis. She is publicly out in a country that persecutes its LGBTQ+ citizens. She is out for all of her fellow Indonesians who cannot be yet, in the hopes of a new era in which they all can feel safe to be.

By the way, she’s 22 years-old.

I first encountered Kai through a Facebook post she made, raising awareness of the persecution of anybody with a queer identity in Indonesia, and the government’s attempt to slip their discrimination into law.

These are Kai’s words, posted on February 21st, 2020:

I need your help.

Indonesia is trying to label all LGBTQ+ people as deviants dangerous to society, legally requiring us to go to conversion therapy.

I am one of the only publicly LGBTQ+ Indonesian Women

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